On the State of Democracy in the World before and after the Great Recession

Much has been said about the impact of the Great Recession (2008-2009) on theconditions and foundations of democracy, especially in the Western world. But has it really beenlike this? Today we have various options to approach the comparative study of the state ofdemocracy in the world through wide-ranging cross-sectional and longitudinal sections. Perhapsone of the most successful is that of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), whose approach toconceptualizing and measuring democracy is to provide a data set that attempts to reflect thecomplexity of the concept of democracy as a system of government that includes, but it goesbeyond the simple presence of elections. For this reason, the V-Dem project collects data tomeasure different principles of democracy, one of which is the electoral one.In principle, the main finding of this documentary effort leads its authors to affirm that“autocratization”, a word with which they call the decrease in democratic features, hasaccelerated in the world, particularly when the existing state at the time of The Great Recessionwill occur with the present situation in 2019. This has to be reflected in the state of the principlesin the electoral question.Detailing the scope and characteristics of this loss of democratic features in general andits manifestation in the electoral sphere throughout this century and between two ten-year cuts(2000-2009 and 2010-2019) is the task that we propose to carry out in this paper. . This, knowingthat 2020 will represent a new watershed in the conditions for the development of democracyand elections in the world, given the experience of the Great Confinement, with a practice andhopefully temporary suspension of electoral exercises in the world and a return uncertain at thepolls in which the repercussions of this event will gradually be seen in the spirit of the electoralbodies of the world.